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| Years in rail transport |
| Timeline of railway history |
This article lists events related to rail transport that occurred in 1809.
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Sir Samuel Morton Peto, 1st Baronet was an English entrepreneur, civil engineer and railway developer, and, for more than 20 years, a Member of Parliament (MP). A partner in the firm of Grissell and Peto, he managed construction firms that built many of London's major buildings and monuments, including the Reform Club, The Lyceum Theatre, Nelson's Column and the replacement Houses of Parliament - commissions which brought him great wealth. The scale of his operations, and that of the workforces needed to undertake them, made him the world's largest employer.
The Timeline of U.S. Railway History depends upon the definition of a railway, as follows: A means of conveyance of passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, also known as tracks.
Wooden railroads, called wagonways, were built in the United States starting from the 1720s. A railroad was reportedly used in the construction of the French fortress at Louisburg, Nova Scotia, in New France in 1720. Between 1762 and 1764, at the close of the French and Indian War (1756–1763), a gravity railroad called Montresor's Tramway was built by British military engineers up the steep riverside terrain near the Niagara River waterfall's escarpment at the Niagara Portage in Lewiston, New York.
A railfan, rail buff or train buff, railway enthusiast,railway buff or trainspotter, or ferroequinologist is a person who is recreationally interested in trains and rail transport systems.
This is a list of the earliest railroads in North America, including various railroad-like precursors to the general modern form of a company or government agency operating locomotive-drawn trains on metal tracks.
A predecessor to the Class I Delaware and Hudson Railway, the 1820s-built Delaware and Hudson Canal Company Gravity Railroad('D&H Gravity Railroad') was a historic gravity railroad incorporated and chartered in 1826 with land grant rights in the US state of Pennsylvania as a humble subsidiary of the Delaware and Hudson Canal and it proved to contain the first trackage of the later organized Delaware and Hudson Railroad. It began as the second long U.S. gravity railroad built initially to haul coal to canal boats, was the second railway chartered in the United States after the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road before even, the Baltimore and Ohio. As a long gravity railway, only the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad pre-dated its beginning of operations.
The Leiper Railroad was a 'family business–built' horse drawn railroad of 0.75 miles (1.21 km), constructed in 1810 after the quarry owner, Thomas Leiper, failed to obtain a charter with legal rights-of-way to instead build his desired canal along Crum Creek. The quarry man's 'make-do' railroad was the continent's first chartered railway, first operational non-temporary railway, first well-documented railroad, and first constructed railroad also meant to be permanent.
The credit of constructing the first permanent tramway in America may therefore be rightly given to Thomas Leiper. He was the owner of a fine quarry not far from Philadelphia, and was much concerned to find an easy mode of carrying stone to tide-water. That a railway would accomplish this end he seem to have had no doubt. To test the matter, and at the same time afford a public exhibition of the merits of tramways, he built a temporary track in the yard of the Bull's Head Tavern in Philadelphia. The tramway was some sixty feet long, had a grade of one inch and a half to the yard, and up it, to the amazement of the spectators, one horse used to draw a four-wheeled wagon loaded with a weight of ten thousand pounds. This was the summer of 1809. Before autumn laborers were at work building a railway from the quarry to the nearest landing, a distance of three quarters of a mile. In the spring of 1810 the road began to be used and continued in using during eighteen years.
by John Bach McMaster, page 494, A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War
Edward Ladd Betts was an English civil engineering contractor who was mainly involved in the building of railways.
Early in the 19th century, the Leiper Canal built in 1828–29 during the middle of the American canal age ran about 3 miles (5 km) along Crum Creek in Delaware County to its mouth in eastern Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley carrying its owner‘s quarried products to docks on the Delaware River tidewater until 1852.
Thomas Leiper was a Scottish American businessman, banker and politician who owned a successful tobacco exportation business as well as several mills and stone quarries. He served as a lieutenant in the Philadelphia City Troop during the American Revolutionary War. He built one of the first railways in America and the first in Pennsylvania. The Leiper Railroad was a three-quarter-mile long track on his property in Nether Providence Township, Pennsylvania used to ship quarry stone to market with animal-powered carts.
This article lists events relating to rail transport that occurred during the 1790s.
railroad Thomas Leiper 1600-1923.